Labor Day is right around the corner -- a holiday whose origins hark back to the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s. This was a time when labor unions grew in popularity and leveraged their power to protest the unsafe working conditions and low wages forced upon many workers. At the time, President Grover Cleveland had a big challenge to address these issues. After failing to break up a railroad strike in 1894, he created Labor Day as a national holiday to officially celebrate the contributions and achievements of American workers. Thankfully, labor conditions have improved significantly since then. To ...

I live out in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, where the promise of new technology overshadows what drives marketing results, and legacy communication protocols like email tend to be undervalued. With all the naysayers about email, let's change the basis of this decline prophecy and look at it through a marketer's lens vs. a general trend level view of consumer email.

How do you allocate your customer-acquisition budget? The Internet has opened up seemingly endless avenues and choices for digital B2C marketers when it comes to acquiring new customers for their email marketing campaigns. There are so many choices, in fact, that it's increasingly easy to become confused -- and because of that, to commit the cardinal sin of spending budget haphazardly.

As you dive into holiday marketing planning and preparation, take time now to make sure that every aspect of your email program gives your mobile customers a shopping experience that approaches the desktop shopping experience.

Well, it's that time of year again. This year, the school supply list was surprisingly long and detailed, much more so than in years past, down to a very specific pencil sharpener that my twins were required to have for second grade and the 4GB thumb drive my daughter had to have for fourth grade. Initially, I was slightly annoyed by the specificity and length of the lists. I knew at a glance that I would have to go to at least three stores to get everything knocked out. So, in honor of back to school, I thought I would ...

Native ads are hot! This controversial yet ultra-effective tactic of blending content, advertisement, and placement is heading straight for consumers' inboxes. With a firm hold on the social channel, native ads are quickly making their way to the email channel where they are a natural fit for mobile newsletter formats. Despite the initial success of native ads, many email publishers are fumbling with their implementation and optimization. Here's some help.

In the spirit of #ThrowbackThursday, let's take a moment to enjoy Roberta Flack's "The Closer I Get To You." It's a very hummable tune, even if you're not much of a singer. And her words are incredibly pertinent for the retail marketer today. "The closer I get to you, the more you make me see" lends itself to our world of retail stores, with close range beacons beaming content to consumers as they shop.

Subscribers change over time. Their needs change. Their interests change. And change can be very dramatic from year to year and season to season. So even if your email program has a great onboarding program where you learn about subscribers' preferences, it's not enough. Analyzing subscriber behavior can give you valuable insights into their current needs and wants, but you should also be doing progressive profiling on a regular basis: that is, directly asking subscribers questions about their interests and preferences so you can serve them better.

Something as basic as a powerful subject line can help increase opens, clicks and ultimately conversion rates. Selecting the right subject line is all about focusing on what pops out for your customers, which involves testing and optimization to get it right. Below is a list of helpful tips designed to help you craft subject lines that rule so that your emails don't get stuck in a summer slump.

In my previous Email Insider column, I shared strategies for using email as a discovery tool based on an excellent wine recommendation. But that wasn't the only time I gained some insight based on my recent European vacation. Here are four cases in point: